I see someone else has suggested this product as well. While I don't handle a load as large as yours, I wholeheartedly recommend GCPro. Stalker lives and breathes un*x and mail apps and they know what their doing. The price is a bit high, but nothing that someone with nice Sun hardware can't afford. If you dig through their website you'll run across recommendations and suggestions for even the most demanding mail loads (think AOL or Hotmail... though I realize those two don't use CGPro).
Take a look at it... I think you'll really like it. I sure do. Free demo too.
It looks like the trolls are out in full force this morning. Any any rate, I have for y'all a very legit question... how do the *bsd's (especially FreeBSD) stack up to Linux and other x86 OS'es in terms of performance on 1 and 2 CPU machines? I did the usual search with Google, DejaGoogle, and Altavista and only came up with a few biased "application x: FreeBSD vs Linux" bakeoffs. Does anyone have any comments or URLs that could be of use in my quest to compare FreeBSD to Linux. Please forgive me and this trollish / flameish post... I come from a NeXT/Sun/SGI background and have at best only dabbled with x86.
I was thinking the very same thing. Perhaps even use several PS2's for a pcig cluster for something in the middle of an SGI Onyx IR system and an SGI Graphics Cluster.
With modern OSes (WinME, Win2K, recent linux distros, etc), modern software, and the overall capabilities of a modern computer system, I've found the bare minimum for usefulness to be a PII-450, 128 MB RAM, 10 GB HD, TNT2 or Rage128. An ideal bottom feeder system would be PII-500, 192 MB, 15 GB. Better still would be 600 - 900 MHz Celeron or Duron. There simply is no sense in using anything older. Machines are too cheap and time is too valuable to cobble together old trash. It's old systems that are holing back our potential and usefulness. The only thing I can think of that would make a PII-266 - PII-400 useful would be a beowulf cluster to allow the machines to work together in parallel on a few modern (and thus demanding) tasks. Move on, folks.
Old PCs are what's holding us back. Unless it's an Athlon or Pentium III you're planning on donating, just throw the darned thing out. Giving a school a Petnium or Pentium II is just giving them troubles and grief. The schools are far better off getting grants and (money) donations for new machines. A 1 - 1.5 GHz machine will be usable for at least 2 or 3 years, anything older will become obsolete much faster. Don't get me wrong, old hardware is fun to tinker with, at home, if you have the time *and* enjoy that sort of thing. It's not something to donate to a school or other local organization unless you are willing to fully support the machine. Do your local school a favor and put aside $1 a day until you can buy them a shiny new machine and/or maybe a few good reference books or accessories.
Unless it's a recent Athlon or Pentium III, it's just not worthwhile for a school (or anyone, really) to setup and maintain. I've been there, I've seen it. Too many tradeoffs for weak performance and being older hardware, it'll become outdated that much faster. If it's a 486 or older, throw it out. If it's a Pentium or Pentium II, throw it out or give it to the geek kid down the block.
I WANT COPIES OF MS DOS 1,2,3,4,5 WIN 1.0 (exists?),2,3; NT 1,2,3,4
My former college roommate had an old DataGeneral portable computer with Windows 1.0. It looked more like a glorified version of DOSSHELL and windows couldn't even overlap. I think it may have been marketed under the name "MS DOS Executive" but I don't recall, it's been awhile. Back in the days of the "MICR*SOFT" logo with the stylized "O". And on a similar thread, I think Windows NT started at version 3.0, but I'm not sure.
Sure that old 386 or 486 doesn't compile with gcc too fast or churn through your MySQL database with lightning speed, but if you cluster a few of them together you can get some impressive performance out of the old buggers. Beowulf is the Viagra of the computing world. One 486 is far too slow to run GIMP filters very quickly, but 4 clustered together will zip through it about 3x as fast (overhead differs depending on your interconnect and task at hand). Do what some of my friends have done -- collect "worthless" 386 and 486 machines untill you have a "second Athlon for free"!:-)
I don't know about you, but I could always use a few spare machines as terminals, webstations, etc. With 32 MB RAM, even a 486/100 is quite usable under X with a slim kernel (read: don't compile in everything under the sun) and a light window manager such as blackbox. Mozilla 0.9 is too slow to use, but Konq works fine. Setup NFS and NIS properly and administration is a breeze.
SGI has offered CDE for years. It doesn't come with the standard 6.2/6.3/6.5 CD set but it is available at no additional charge. Ask your sales rep for "SC4-CDE-5.0".
The 750 has "entry" ATI graphics. Don't expect 98422 frames per second in quake.
It uses PC100 because its based on an old reference board design. This is essentially the same system that SGI and HP have been demoing for the past 8 months. The really hot IA64 stuff (Infiniband, multiple channels of DDRSDRAM/RDRAM) will be out by next year.
No kidding. And before MIPS R10K there was the beast that was the R8K *chipset*. To date I still don't think there is any CPU that was faster in fp per clock cycle than the R8K. SGI's been doing 64bit since the early 1990s.
64-bit alone is nothing new, but I guess SGI needs all the buzz they can get. They've all but left their own MIPS/IRIX market and have entered the competitive and very non-SGI-like OEM world.
SGI keeps taking about a MIPS/IRIX rebirth, but I still haven't seen a single sign of that happening. And heck, they're not even marketing what they currently have. The current MIPS/IRIX lineup is getting old, but still somewhat capable. The Octane2 with the DM2 "Snowball" can handle realtime uncompressed 1080i HDTV (250+ MB/sec) without blinking. Yet they don't even talk about it.
I'm under the impression that SGI wants to be yet another OEM box builder.
I don't get it either. In 1995 SGI was on top of the world with their workstations and servers. Unmatched hardware, great CPUs, ungodly graphics. The "O series" (O2/Octane/Origin/Onyx) were a bit late, but still impressive. But things haven't changed much at all since then (1996/1997). SGI has really slipped and rather than making a huge hardware comeback they seem to be reinventing themselves as a watered down Dell or VA Linux... and they're not doing a good job at it.
I don't get it either.
SGI's few remaining developers are scared too. Cheaper hardware means they can't sell their (expensive to develop) software at a high price anymore. Using comodity hardware and opensource software means your customers can all too easily move away overnight. Great for the users, dangerous for SGI and its developers.
They are the same box, built by HP. In fact, they've both been around since late 2000. If you look at photos of early Itanium clusters or even looked at the various Itanium demos at SC2000 you would notice that they all have the same case are were badged either HP or SGI. The only machines SGI builds itself are the O2/Octane/Origin/Onyx MIPS/IRIX machines. Mostly built in Chippewa Falls, WI (home of Cray) with some assembly done overseas. The MIPS R12K/R14K CPUs are fabbed by NEC and the PCBs are made by Celestica. That's just MIPS/IRIX. All of SGI's Intel-based machines (both IA-32 Pentium and IA-64 Itanium) are OEM'ed. VA Linux builds some of SGI's rackmount servers, and I'm not sure who builds their PC workstations. HP builds the 750 Itanium workstation.
If you haven't noticed, SGI's goal is to become the next VA Linux, Penguin Computing, or Dell. And they're not even doing a good job with that!
SGI finally managed to ship an Itanium-based workstation (at least to developers). Let's see what has happined to MIPS/IRIX since the first bits of Itanium info from Intel:
O2 - aside from CPU upgrades, has remained unchanged since the fall of 1996
Octane/Octane2 - aside from a very minor backplane and ram thruput tweak and a new series of (late and underpowered) gfx, has remained unchanged since the spring of 1997
Origin 200 - aside from CPU upgrades, has remained unchanged since the spring of 1997
All of the above machines, while featuring expansion, only have U/W 40MB/sec onboard SCSI... getting a bit old for modern 10K and 15K RPM drives.
Origin/Onyx 3000 has been really the only MIPS/IRIX innovation since early 1997, but note that Origin 3000 will eventually be able to take Itanium CPUs (by replacing the CPU bricks) as the system was designed to be CPU agnostic.
Regardless of what SGI has been saying on their roadmaps, I think it's clear that MIPS/IRIX is a thing of the past. (S)uddenly (G)one (I)ntel. Hello Linux and Intel.
That's not a server, it's a workstation (though it ships with low-end ATI graphics). The 750 has been available to "qualified developers" since early March so I doubt it will take long for the machine to ship in volume. I have no idea how it performs, the two demos of the machine I've seen (SC2000 and earlier this year at an IA64 conference) were little more than "look, KDE!... look, GNOME!". Interesting none the less.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't seem to find a tarball of your source.
I see someone else has suggested this product as well. While I don't handle a load as large as yours, I wholeheartedly recommend GCPro. Stalker lives and breathes un*x and mail apps and they know what their doing. The price is a bit high, but nothing that someone with nice Sun hardware can't afford. If you dig through their website you'll run across recommendations and suggestions for even the most demanding mail loads (think AOL or Hotmail... though I realize those two don't use CGPro).
Take a look at it... I think you'll really like it. I sure do. Free demo too.
It looks like the trolls are out in full force this morning. Any any rate, I have for y'all a very legit question... how do the *bsd's (especially FreeBSD) stack up to Linux and other x86 OS'es in terms of performance on 1 and 2 CPU machines? I did the usual search with Google, DejaGoogle, and Altavista and only came up with a few biased "application x: FreeBSD vs Linux" bakeoffs. Does anyone have any comments or URLs that could be of use in my quest to compare FreeBSD to Linux. Please forgive me and this trollish / flameish post... I come from a NeXT/Sun/SGI background and have at best only dabbled with x86.
Anyone know of an ethernet interface for PS1? If so, I could easily have 6 webservers going here before the week is up!
I was thinking the very same thing. Perhaps even use several PS2's for a pcig cluster for something in the middle of an SGI Onyx IR system and an SGI Graphics Cluster.
With modern OSes (WinME, Win2K, recent linux distros, etc), modern software, and the overall capabilities of a modern computer system, I've found the bare minimum for usefulness to be a PII-450, 128 MB RAM, 10 GB HD, TNT2 or Rage128. An ideal bottom feeder system would be PII-500, 192 MB, 15 GB. Better still would be 600 - 900 MHz Celeron or Duron. There simply is no sense in using anything older. Machines are too cheap and time is too valuable to cobble together old trash. It's old systems that are holing back our potential and usefulness. The only thing I can think of that would make a PII-266 - PII-400 useful would be a beowulf cluster to allow the machines to work together in parallel on a few modern (and thus demanding) tasks. Move on, folks.
Old PCs are what's holding us back. Unless it's an Athlon or Pentium III you're planning on donating, just throw the darned thing out. Giving a school a Petnium or Pentium II is just giving them troubles and grief. The schools are far better off getting grants and (money) donations for new machines. A 1 - 1.5 GHz machine will be usable for at least 2 or 3 years, anything older will become obsolete much faster. Don't get me wrong, old hardware is fun to tinker with, at home, if you have the time *and* enjoy that sort of thing. It's not something to donate to a school or other local organization unless you are willing to fully support the machine. Do your local school a favor and put aside $1 a day until you can buy them a shiny new machine and/or maybe a few good reference books or accessories.
Unless it's a recent Athlon or Pentium III, it's just not worthwhile for a school (or anyone, really) to setup and maintain. I've been there, I've seen it. Too many tradeoffs for weak performance and being older hardware, it'll become outdated that much faster. If it's a 486 or older, throw it out. If it's a Pentium or Pentium II, throw it out or give it to the geek kid down the block.
I WANT COPIES OF MS DOS 1,2,3,4,5 WIN 1.0 (exists?),2,3; NT 1,2,3,4
My former college roommate had an old DataGeneral portable computer with Windows 1.0. It looked more like a glorified version of DOSSHELL and windows couldn't even overlap. I think it may have been marketed under the name "MS DOS Executive" but I don't recall, it's been awhile. Back in the days of the "MICR*SOFT" logo with the stylized "O". And on a similar thread, I think Windows NT started at version 3.0, but I'm not sure.
Sure that old 386 or 486 doesn't compile with gcc too fast or churn through your MySQL database with lightning speed, but if you cluster a few of them together you can get some impressive performance out of the old buggers. Beowulf is the Viagra of the computing world. One 486 is far too slow to run GIMP filters very quickly, but 4 clustered together will zip through it about 3x as fast (overhead differs depending on your interconnect and task at hand). Do what some of my friends have done -- collect "worthless" 386 and 486 machines untill you have a "second Athlon for free"! :-)
I don't know about you, but I could always use a few spare machines as terminals, webstations, etc. With 32 MB RAM, even a 486/100 is quite usable under X with a slim kernel (read: don't compile in everything under the sun) and a light window manager such as blackbox. Mozilla 0.9 is too slow to use, but Konq works fine. Setup NFS and NIS properly and administration is a breeze.
Any machine that can run NEXTSTEP can also run OPENSTEP (albeit slightly slower). Upgrade to OPENTSTEP 4.2 and use OmniWeb 3.0.
Or.....
Install one of the many freeware X clients on NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and view your favorite browser remotely (-display your.ip.address).
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/05/29/16321 4&cid=114
Another shot of the Itanium cluster and a neat photo of the Origin 3000:
c kofcpu3.jpg
c kofcpu4.jpg
http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/pictures/ra
http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/pictures/ra
"imagine a beowulf of these"
c kofcpu2.jpg
Well, SGI did.
http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/pictures/ra
SGI has offered CDE for years. It doesn't come with the standard 6.2/6.3/6.5 CD set but it is available at no additional charge. Ask your sales rep for "SC4-CDE-5.0".
Y'know... at first I didn't like the new "sgi" logo and wanted the cube back. But I'm starting to really like the new logo.
a ne.jpg
http://www.sgi.com/o2/images/hp_o2.jpg
http://www.arsc.edu/resources/hardware/images/Oct
VS.
http://www.reputable.com/sgipix/0.jpeg
Regardless of what other people think:
http://www.beyondboxes.net/sticker.jpg
http://www.arke.de/TC/sgi-homer.gif
The 750 has "entry" ATI graphics. Don't expect 98422 frames per second in quake.
It uses PC100 because its based on an old reference board design. This is essentially the same system that SGI and HP have been demoing for the past 8 months. The really hot IA64 stuff (Infiniband, multiple channels of DDRSDRAM/RDRAM) will be out by next year.
No kidding. And before MIPS R10K there was the beast that was the R8K *chipset*. To date I still don't think there is any CPU that was faster in fp per clock cycle than the R8K. SGI's been doing 64bit since the early 1990s.
64-bit alone is nothing new, but I guess SGI needs all the buzz they can get. They've all but left their own MIPS/IRIX market and have entered the competitive and very non-SGI-like OEM world.
It's sort of like a corporate version of Frogger.
SGI keeps taking about a MIPS/IRIX rebirth, but I still haven't seen a single sign of that happening. And heck, they're not even marketing what they currently have. The current MIPS/IRIX lineup is getting old, but still somewhat capable. The Octane2 with the DM2 "Snowball" can handle realtime uncompressed 1080i HDTV (250+ MB/sec) without blinking. Yet they don't even talk about it.
I'm under the impression that SGI wants to be yet another OEM box builder.
I don't get it either. In 1995 SGI was on top of the world with their workstations and servers. Unmatched hardware, great CPUs, ungodly graphics. The "O series" (O2/Octane/Origin/Onyx) were a bit late, but still impressive. But things haven't changed much at all since then (1996/1997). SGI has really slipped and rather than making a huge hardware comeback they seem to be reinventing themselves as a watered down Dell or VA Linux... and they're not doing a good job at it.
I don't get it either.
SGI's few remaining developers are scared too. Cheaper hardware means they can't sell their (expensive to develop) software at a high price anymore. Using comodity hardware and opensource software means your customers can all too easily move away overnight. Great for the users, dangerous for SGI and its developers.
They are the same box, built by HP. In fact, they've both been around since late 2000. If you look at photos of early Itanium clusters or even looked at the various Itanium demos at SC2000 you would notice that they all have the same case are were badged either HP or SGI. The only machines SGI builds itself are the O2/Octane/Origin/Onyx MIPS/IRIX machines. Mostly built in Chippewa Falls, WI (home of Cray) with some assembly done overseas. The MIPS R12K/R14K CPUs are fabbed by NEC and the PCBs are made by Celestica. That's just MIPS/IRIX. All of SGI's Intel-based machines (both IA-32 Pentium and IA-64 Itanium) are OEM'ed. VA Linux builds some of SGI's rackmount servers, and I'm not sure who builds their PC workstations. HP builds the 750 Itanium workstation.
If you haven't noticed, SGI's goal is to become the next VA Linux, Penguin Computing, or Dell. And they're not even doing a good job with that!
*sigh*
SGI finally managed to ship an Itanium-based workstation (at least to developers). Let's see what has happined to MIPS/IRIX since the first bits of Itanium info from Intel:
O2 - aside from CPU upgrades, has remained unchanged since the fall of 1996
Octane/Octane2 - aside from a very minor backplane and ram thruput tweak and a new series of (late and underpowered) gfx, has remained unchanged since the spring of 1997
Origin 200 - aside from CPU upgrades, has remained unchanged since the spring of 1997
All of the above machines, while featuring expansion, only have U/W 40MB/sec onboard SCSI... getting a bit old for modern 10K and 15K RPM drives.
Origin/Onyx 3000 has been really the only MIPS/IRIX innovation since early 1997, but note that Origin 3000 will eventually be able to take Itanium CPUs (by replacing the CPU bricks) as the system was designed to be CPU agnostic.
Regardless of what SGI has been saying on their roadmaps, I think it's clear that MIPS/IRIX is a thing of the past. (S)uddenly (G)one (I)ntel. Hello Linux and Intel.
What's up with the new "sgi" logo??
That's not a server, it's a workstation (though it ships with low-end ATI graphics). The 750 has been available to "qualified developers" since early March so I doubt it will take long for the machine to ship in volume. I have no idea how it performs, the two demos of the machine I've seen (SC2000 and earlier this year at an IA64 conference) were little more than "look, KDE!... look, GNOME!". Interesting none the less.
1.3.20 has been out for what, 5 days already? Yeesh, look at the Freshmeat Slashbox from time to time.